Protecting a Course

Question

Hello,
I am examining captivate for using on my e-learning website.
Currently I sell the content in protected PDF and .exe formats.
Now I want to provide online content. However I want to see
what options I have to:
1- Protect the content from download (professional users look
into html codes and steal the flash files, video and voice etc).
2- To limit access to my customers only (i.e. no access to
non-customers who have received a URL of a content illegally).
For the second item I think about session control (eg. in
PHP), however upon successful login people might find actual URLs
of flash files etc.
Regards,
Mac

Answer 1

Well the first thing to look into is an LMS. You would need
to have access control in order to view your courses and an LMS can
do that for you. As an added bonus you get SCORM tracking if you
use an LMS.
That would sort out the access control. Sure you can do it
with PHP as well, but an LMS (not open source) is more secure. Some
LMS even offer the possibility to purchase access to courses via
Paypal and then they get a personalized access to that particular
course.
As for preventing the download of your files (Captivate
swf's, voice and videofiles) that is almost impossible to achieve.
Anyone can download the swf files and decompile them. As for
downloading video and audiofiles that is pretty easy aswell.
Captivate offers some features that you could use to make it
more difficult for the downloaders to use the files. First of all
you could add a password to your course that the user would need to
enter before viewing it. It isn't very userfriendly, but it could
be an option. Secondly you could add an expiration date to your
project. Perhaps you could set your courses to expire at a given
date. It would mean that you would have to upload a new course with
a new expiration date often though.
Are you worried about people steal your course as a whole or
just the content?
If you are worried about the course as a whole then you could
make some custom flash components to load text, images, videos and
audio into your Captivate project. That way you can have Captivate
export these files as standalone files, which Captivate loads when
needed. This would make it more difficult for anyone to download
your entire project. Furthermore you could encrypt these files with
SWF Encrypt (
http://www.amayeta.com).
You could add a Flash Tracker to your course (a flash file
inserted in your project) that reports the location (url) of where
your project is hosted. That way if someone steals your course and
puts it on their own server you would have the url of where it's
hosted and could go after them legally.
The last thing I can think of is to add another custom flash
file on the first page of your captivate project. This file could
pause the project and check if it is hosted on the correct domain.
If that is the case then it would start to play your course. If not
then it could display a custom message and not play the course. I'm
working on developing such a file right now and when it's done I'll
post some information on my website.
Well that's all I could think off. Maybe someone else have
more things to offer.